A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second
(FLOPS.) Additionally, a petaflop can be measured as “one thousand teraflops”. A petaflop computer would require a massive number of computers working in parallel on the same problem. Applications might include real-time nuclear magnetic resonance imaging during surgery or even astrophysical simulation.
Today's fastest parallel computing operations are capable of teraflop speeds. The world's fastest supercomputer today, the climate-modeling Earth, has a top speed of 40 trillion operations a second. Scientists predict we will see a petaflop computer by the year 2010, while companies involved in supercomputing research and design claim it could be as early as 2006.
